Forget crowd-funding, startups are now turning to crowd ownership campaigns. Hong Kong-based travel startup, Spottly, is currently running a crowd ownership campaign on RocketClub, a platform offering startup shares, to offer a 2% ownership stake in the company to its user community. Last weekend, it became the first company to reach its initial goal on the platform of 1,000 supporters.

Charlotte Chen, the co-founder and chief marketing officer at Spottly, said her company would look into the opportunity presented by the programming interface. Hong Kong-based Spottly provides a travel app for users to find, collect and share their favourite places in the world.

This app finally puts all your food and tourist snaps to good use as way to share and recommend restaurants or places of interest. Launched in November 2013, Spottly allows users to record of their favourite finds with a picture, brief description and location...